EXISTENTIALISM AND DEATH*Existentialism is not a doctrine but a label widely used to lump together several philosophers and writers who are more or less opposedto doctrines while considering a few extreme experiences the beststarting point for philosophic thinking. Spearheading the movement,Kierkegaard derided Hegel's system and wrote books on Fear andTrembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death, which is despair, ( 1849). Three-quarters of a centurylater, Jaspers devoted a central section of his Psychology of Weltanschauungen (1919) to extreme situations (Grenzsituationen),among which he included guilt and death. But if existentialism iswidely associated not merely with extreme experiences in generalbut above all with death, this is due primarily to Heidegger whodiscussed death in a crucial 32-page chapter of his influential Beingand Time (1927). Later, Sartre included a section on death in hisBeing and Nothingness (1943) and criticized Heidegger; and Camusdevoted his two would-be philosophic books to suicide (The Mythof Sisyphus, 1942) and murder (The Rebel, 1951).It was Heidegger who moved death into the center of discussion.But owing in part to the eccentricity of his approach, the discussion influenced by him has revolved rather more around histerminology than around the phenomena which are frequently referred to but rarely illuminated. A discussion of existentialism anddeath should therefore begin with Heidegger, and by first givingsome attention to his approach it may throw critical light on muchof existentialism.2Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, begins with a 40-pageIntroduction that ends with "The Outline of the Treatise." Weare told that the projected work has two parts, each of whichconsists of three long sections. The published work, subtitled "FirstHalf," contains only the first two sections of Part One. The"Second Half" has never appeared.* This essay was written for The Meaning of Death, edited by Herman Feifel,to be published by McGraw-Hill in 1960.75Of the two sections published, the first bears the title, "Thepreparatory fundamental analysis of Being-there." "Being-there"(Dasein) is Heidegger's term for human existence, as opposed tothe being of things and animals. Heidegger's central concern iswith "the meaning of Being"; but he finds that this concern itselfis "a mode of the Being of some beings" (p. 7), namely humanbeings, and he tries to show in his Introduction that "the meaningof Being" must be explored by way of an analysis of "Being-there."This, he argues is the only way to break the deadlock in the discussion of Being begun by the Greek philosophers?a deadlock dueto the fact that philosophers, at least since Aristotle, always discussed beings rather than Being.1 To gain an approach to Being, wemust study not things but a mode of Being; and the mode of Beingmost open to us is our own Being: Being-there. Of this Heideggerproposes to offer a phenomenological analysis, and he expresslystates his indebtedness to Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school (especially on p. 38). Indeed, Being and Timefirst appeared in Husserl's Jahrbuch f?r Philosophie und ph?nomenologische Forschung.It is entirely typical of Heidegger's essentially unphenomenological procedure that he explains "The phenomenological method ofthe inquiry" (?7) by devoting one subsection to "The concept ofthe phenomenon" and another to "The concept of the Logos," eachtime offering dubious discussions of the etymologies of the Greekwords, before he finally comes to the conclusion that the meaningof phenomenology can be formulated: "to allow to see from itselfthat which shows itself, as it shows itself from itself" (Das was sichzeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst hersehen lassen). And he himself adds: "But this is not saying anythingdifferent at all from the maxim cited above; 'To the things themselves!'" This had been Husserl's maxim. Heidegger takes sevenpages of dubious arguments, questionable etymologies, and extremely arbitrary and obscure coinages and formulations to say in abizarre way what not only could be said, but what others beforehim actually had said, in four words.1 My suggestion that the distinction between das Sein and das Seiende be rendered in English by using Being for the former and beings for the latter hasHeidegger's enthusiastic approval. His distinction was suggested to him by theGreek philosophers, and he actually found the English "beings" superior to theGerman Seiendes because the English recaptures the Greek plural, ta onta. (Cf.my Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p .206.) All translations from theGerman in the present essay are my own.76In Being and Time coinages are the crux of his technique. Hecalls "the characteristics of Being-there existentials [Existenzialien].They must be distinguished sharply from the determinations of theBeing of those beings whose Being is not Being-there, the latterbeing categories" (p. 44). "Existentials and categories are the twobasic possibilities of characteristics of Being. The beings that correspond to them demand different modes of asking primary questions: beings are either Who (existence) or Which (Being-at-handin the widest sense)" (p. 45).It has not been generally noted, if it has been noted at all, thatwithout these quaint locutions the book would not only be muchless obscure, and therefore much less fitted for endless discussionsin European and South-American graduate seminars, but also afraction of its length?considerably under 100 pages instead of438. For Heidegger does not introduce coinages to say briefly whatwould otherwise require lengthy repititions. On the contrary.While Kierkegaard had derided professorial manners and concentrated on the most extreme experiences, and Nietzsche wroteof guilt, conscience, and death as if he did not even know ofacademic airs, Heidegger housebreaks Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche'sproblems by discussing them in such a style that Hegel and Aquinasseem unacademic by comparison. The following footnote is entirelycharacteristic: "The auth. may remark that he has repeatedly communicated the analysis of the about-world [Umwelt] and, altogether, the 'hermeneutics of the facticity' of Being-there, in hislectures since the wint. semest. 1919/20" (p. 72). Husserl is alwayscited as "E. Husserl" and Kant as "I. Kant"?and his minions dutifully cite the master as "M. Heidegger."How Kierkegaard would have loved to comment on Heidegger'soccasional "The detailed reasons for the following considerationswill be given only in . . . Part II, Section 2"?which never saw thelight of day (p. 89). Eleven pages later we read: "only now thehere accomplished critique of the Cartesian, and fundamentally stillpresently accepted, world-ontology can be assured of its philosophicrights. To that end the following must be shown (cf. Part I, Sect.3)." Alas, this, too, was never published; but after reading the fourquestions that follow one does not feel any keen regret. Witnessthe second: "Why is it that in-worldly beings take the place ofthe leaped-over phenomenon by leaping into the picture as theontological topic?" (I.e., why have beings been discussed insteadof Being?) Though Heidegger is hardly a poet, his terminology77recalls one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "The poet presents his thoughtsfestively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could notwalk" (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 54).If all the sentences quoted so far are readily translatable intoless baroque language, the following italicized explanation of understanding (p. 144) may serve as an example of the many more opaquepronouncements. (No other well-known philosophic work containsnearly so many italics?or rather their German equivalent whichtakes up twice as much space as ordinary type.) "Understandingis the existential Being of the own Being-able-to-be of Being-thereitself, but such that this Being in itself opens up the Where-at ofBeing with itself" (Verstehen ist das existenziale Sein des eigenenSeink?nnens des Daseins selbst, so zwar, dass dieses Sein an ihmselbst das Woran des mit ihm selbst Seins erschliesst). The following sentence reads in full: "The structure of this existential mustnow be grasped and expressed still more sharply." Still more?Heidegger's discussion of death comes near the beginning of thesecond of the two sections he published. To understand it, two keyconcepts of the first section should be mentioned briefly. The firstis Das Man, one of Heidegger's happier coinages. The German wordman is the equivalent of the English one in such locutions as "onedoes not do that" or "of course, one must die." But the Germanman does not have any of the other meanings of the English wordone. It is therefore understandable why Das Man has been translatedsometimes as "the public" or "the anonymous They," but sinceHeidegger also makes much of the phrase Man selbst, which means"oneself," it is preferable to translate Das Man as "the One." TheOne is the despot that rules over the inauthentic Being-there of oureveryday live

Almost all the jobs I had before and after that have felt abstract, distant from people’s real problems. They’ve involved me having to convince myself that the work was important and that it was making an impact. When I’m theorizing and organizing for the “digital commons,” I constantly questioned myself if I was making the right kind of interventions. If the things I’m fighting for — platform co-operatives, community networks, digital research and cultural archives, Free and Open Source projects — will ever become so full-fledged as to help us confront the planetary crisis that lies ahead of us.  At the library, I wasn’t fighting for a future that I wanted to manifest, I was standing in it. All the books that passed through my hands, the kindergarteners that sang along with me during story time, the patrons who gleefully placed an item in front of me to be checked out. I’d never seen so many grateful people day to day, week to week. The high you get from helping someone find exactly what they were looking for, is right there on the shelf (and they don’t need to pay for it because it’s already theirs!). There’s seriously nothing else like it.

One must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister traveling companion — that irony of life, which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates) just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito.) Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. (Søren Kierkegaard's Journals & Papers IA Gilleleie, 1 August 1835)